The book Creations. Medieval Rituals, the Arts, and the Concept of Creation is a collection of essays about the ideas of creation and creativity: both share the potential to produce something out of nothing. The main purpose of this book is to establish a significant link between God's activity of producing things out of nothing, usually called creatio ex nihilo, and the possibility that humans can do something similar, for example their potential to produce works of art and rituals. The question of the possibility that something could come to be out of nothing is a very ancient one (see the excellent book by Richard Sorabji Time, Creation 8 the Continuum, London, 1983). Greek philosophy tried to answer this question at several intervals, and, after Parmenide's prohibition about radical separation between being and non-being, only with Aristotle' speculation do we have a real attempt to solve the problem of the ontological and logical distance between being and non-being (i.e. nothing). Aristotle made possible the existence of a kind of change, that he called coming-to-be, by which a new substance could suddenly start to be. The reference is to his works to the generation of natural things, in which he explains how the potential "being" of something (that is actually non-being-yet-this-thing) could become an actual being of that thing. I've suggested in my book Dal Non essere all'essere (Soveria Mannelli, 2006) that Aristotelian thought about generation from non-being and the role of substance in this process had a great influence during the first centuries of the Christian era.
The thirteen essays are all very interesting. The Introduction and the first essay, both by Eyolf Østrem (the Introduction written with Nils Holger Petersen), play a fundamental role in understanding the whole collection and its conclusions. Østrem explains the interest in establishing a large number of common points between creation and creativity. To use his own words, we can say that the idea of creation had passed through such a large transformation that we can see human creativity as a parallel of divine creative power (3). In both situations there is the emergence of something that before had no existence. What Østrem offers us is an excellent analysis of the evolution of the relationship between creation and creativity, during the Middle Ages and Modernity. Moreover, Østrem claims that before the Modern era, with the exception of Nicholas of Cusa, to whom he gives a very important role in the history of the concept of human creativity up until the definition of humanus deus, there was no explicit parallelism between divine creation and human activities. I would suggest that in reality there is at least one occurrence in which a medieval author establishes a parallelism between divine creation and the power of man to produce out of nothing. This medieval author says that divine creation ex nihilo is in one sense similar to a man who being in silence suddenly starts to speak. The author is John Duns Scotus and the context is Reportata Parisiensa II, distinctio 1, quaestio 3, n. 2.
Wim Verbaal's study about the Invocatio Musae describes how the invocation of divinity is a constant element at every step of poetic evolution, from the first of Homer's epic poems, in which the poet was just the voice of Divinity, to Rimbaud or Pasolini, in which the presence of invocation is not merely a literary topos but still a source of inspiration.
The article by Salvador Ryan is focused on the tradition of Bardic poetry in Ireland. He describes the influence of biblical recitations about creation on the works of Bardic poets. In particular, Ryan examines the poems of a 13th century poet, Donnchadh Mór Ó Dálaigh. This poet makes explicit references to creatio ex nihilo and restates some parts of Genesis, as for example the creation of man. This is quite a rare thing in Bardic poetry, in which the influence of biblical creation was considerable. In this very interesting essay we receive also the information that the culminating moment of creation was the Incarnation of Christ. The figure of Christ is therefore considered as a continuum with God's creation. Christ, and secondly Adam, is the fulfillment of original creation (77-78).
A relevant part of this collection of essays is dedicated to the analysis of rituals and liturgy. Nils Holger Petersen points out the influence of biblical creation on medieval liturgy. The central role that both the Nicene-Constantinopolitan and the Apostles' Creeds had in liturgical ceremonies connected to Baptism from the first centuries was the main way in which the story of creation influenced medieval liturgy and rituals. Particularly, creation was ritualized during the Easter Vigil, during which baptisms were often celebrated and there was the symbolic passage from dark to light. Moreover the Easter Vigil is the conclusion of salvation history from creation to Resurrection and represents to Christians a sort of regeneration. Thanks to some musical examples, Petersen shows how biblical creation narratives, the medieval Easter Vigil and Haydn's oratorio Die Schöpfung (The Creation) all belong to the cultural memory of Western Europe. Haydn's beautiful composition on creation is also addressed in Heinrich W. Schwab essay, which offers to the reader a precious description of the work (the starting moment of the composition seems to reproduce an explosion, a sort of "big bang") as well as Haydn's emotions in composing and executing it. This oratorio is at the same time an original act of creativity and a work in praise of God the creator.
Richard Utz's essay about alternative worlds in medieval literary discourse has a very interesting philosophical perspective. He focuses his attention mainly on Chaucer's work entitled Troilus and Criseyde. Utz proposes to read this Chaucer work as the reproduction by the author of God's potentia absoluta, that is the simultaneous presence of alternatives which are only under the author's control. Utz, following other scholars, shows the influence that the Nominalist school had on Chaucer's works, although the view according to which a thinker who exalts God's omnipotence (potentia absoluta) has to be qualified as "nominalist" rather that "realist" or "hyper realist," it is not commonly accepted. For example one could take a look at Luca Parisoli's books on John Duns Scotus--who was probably the most important defender of God's omnipotence--(La Philosophie Normative de Jean Duns Scot, Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, Roma 2001, La Contraddizione Vera, Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, 2005).
Magnar Breivik presents Arnold Schoenberg's thought about the relationship between the divine act of creation and the action of the "human creator." There is a fundamental difference between the two creations: while God's will and accomplishment coincide simultaneously (166), for humans there is necessarily a long wait between an original idea and its materialization. This is mainly the result of the Fall of Man and the consequent driving out of Paradise. According to Schoenberg after the Fall of Man creativity becomes dependent on construction.
The third and last part of book contains four essays that share a certain disruption of ideas of creation. The essay by Peter Davidson is about the discovery of the New World by European explorers and the successive colonizations by Christian missions. New plants (particularly the passion flower) and new living beings generated a new creative energy in the emblematic interpretation of reality and of creation. "Old" creation was fulfilled with new creatures of the new world. Hans Henrik Lohfert Jorgensen's article deals with anti-ritual images of the late Middle-Ages, and it is a little marginal to the book's main theme. Dedicated to the contemporary musician Luciano Boerio is the study of Claus Clüver. Clüver focus his attention on section III of Boerio's Sinfonia in which he sees a "metonymic representation of creation in the mythological sense" (232) and he examines in great detail Boerio's work of collaging pre-existent texts to create something radically new. The last essay is written by Inge Birgitte Siegumfeldt and is dedicated to an analysis of the idea of creation as an act of naming, sealing or signing (248) and as it appears in the kabbalistic tradition, in which God creates through the first letter of His name, Y. Moreover the author tries to establish a very interesting link between the rabbinic reading of creation and philosophical deconstruction (for example Jacques Derrida's thought).
There are in this collection of essays several perspectives from which the questions of creation and creativity are presented. This book is very rich in suggestions and it is surely a very precious instrument to approach the question about the idea of creation and its conceptual implications in the different fields of knowledge.